Oslo Accords

On September 13, 1993, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands on the White House lawn, with President Bill Clinton between them, after signing the Declaration of Principles. The deal came out of secret talks in Norway, held mostly in and near Oslo. In letters exchanged days earlier the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism, and Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.¹

The agreement followed decades of conflict over the land taken in the 1967 Six-Day War, and the first Palestinian uprising (intifada) from 1987, which showed that the occupation had a growing cost. The end of the Cold War, the Gulf War of 1991, and the Madrid conference that year weakened the PLO's backers and pushed both sides toward talks. Norwegian officials hosted secret channels between Israeli academics and PLO officials in 1993, and Israeli and PLO leaders then took them over.¹

The accords set up a Palestinian Authority with limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, with the hardest issues, such as Jerusalem, refugees, borders and settlements, left for talks within five years. Oslo II in 1995 divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C. Opponents on both sides resisted: Hamas carried out suicide bombings, Jewish settlement grew, and in November 1995 a Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin. The talks at Camp David in 2000 failed, and the second intifada began. Rabin, Arafat and Shimon Peres shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.¹³²